Cloanto has released the latest version of Amiga Forever, its bundle combining the one-time Commodore operating system, "classic" hardware emulators, games and other assorted "items of historical interest".
Amiga Forever 2009 essentially provides full Windows 7 compatibility.
The emulators are open source and readily available …

Hmm

I miss my Amiga

A great machine, the first time real multimedia could be created by us average users. Yeah the games were good but what set the Amiga apart were the graphics and audio capability. Video capture, audio editing, scanning, all stuff I take for granted today that I first did on an Amiga.

Sadly the Amiga died (despite what the fanboys say) and by the end of 1994 it was inevitable that the PC was the place to be in order to use the latest software.

Today I use a Mac and a PC. I suppose the Mac is the closest to the Amiga, not for the OS but just how some of the software operates and the weird and wonderful audio and video tools it seems to attract,

WOW!

For ever?

<sniff>

Ahh... Memories of those halcyon days of 16-(then 32)-bit pleasure. The last great, true home computer. It had charm. It had grace. It had more software than you could cram into your loft. Occasionally I fire up my collection, play a while, then wipe away a tear as I resign the vanilla wonders back to their boxes.

Well done, PC, for stripping any semblance of character or personality from home computing...

Could have been a Commodore world instead of Microsoft

WTF...

...Sam Dicker, Bob Burns, Jay Miner and Dale Luck. Is it me or do these all sound like cowboy characters in some really cheesy western. Also, Sam Dicker must have taken some serious crap at school for his name. Sorry guys.

Oh yeah @ AC 12:15 - More software than Mac OS? What the hell are you talkin' about, clearly you need to wipe that big lump of Ballmers shit off your nose.

Ah, the Amiga

The Amiga was a truly great machine, scuppered by truly appalling management. The Commodore bosses of the time deserve some kind of award for Most Consecutive Lousy Business Decisions. I was 14 at the time, and even I could see that over those few years, every new idea Commodore produced was rubbish.

The rest of the computer industry at the time also deserves a share of the stick for failing to buy out the Amiga tech when Commodore crashed and burned. It took the better part of 10 years before a PC at the same price as the old Amiga could match it. Anyone with the Amiga technology could have made an absolute killing, and chances are we'd all be using Amigas at home now instead. Remember that the main reason home PCs took off wasn't particularly email or Word, it was Doom and other classic PC-based games - and in the late 80s there wasn't anything that could touch the Amiga for games, especially when Atari finally bit the dust. When Doom came around, you needed a £1K machine to do anything much on a PC, and all that bought you was something with lower-quality graphics and sound than the old A500.

If you're too young to remember the Amiga, let's give you an example of how far ahead it was. Let's talk about a game where you're wandering round a country (something like 20 miles each direction), with full open-ended freedom of movement. It's done in an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective. You can steal cars, bikes, tanks, boats, helicopters and even windsurfers for transportation. You can talk to civilians but security forces will try to shoot you. You can shoot people, and steal weaponry. And in this environment you've got a series of missions to accomplish. "Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001", you say. "What an absolute classic - a huge step forward for games."

@Matt B

There are many things that stood the Amiga head and shoulders above the rest

The innovative OS, the highly advanced architecture, but for me it was the general software culture that really stood out.

When a new version of a package came out, almost without fail, the previous version was given away free on the cover of the magazines.

Towards the end of the romance with my Amiga 4000T (spanish for girlfriend) I must have had 5 or 6 database apps, 3-4 word processors, 8-9 music programs, more graphics packages than I could wave a big stick at, realtime 3D apps, 5 raytracing apps, DTP, CAD, programming IDEs covering every level from BASIC right the way through to assembler...

I don't claim to be some l33t expert in all of them, but I always had a play.

All full packages. No trialware, no crippleware. Just disk box after disc box, chock full of software that truly expanded my horizons, empowering and inspiring.

The real eye opener was when I saw the dearth of software my friends had on their IBM compatibles.

Not only the lack of range in applications, but the almost complete lack of variety. Everything that arrived on a PC magazine seemed to be a trial version. If I only had 30 days to play with a 3D ray tracing package, I wouldn't have got anywhere with it.

As is, I had all the time in the world to pick up and play with software, try new concepts, experience different interface designs and innovations - some worked, some didn't. (I for one loath Adobes "let's try to cram every feature of our package on-screen at once in a million toolboxes" ethos.)

MS Word 6 was the WORST word processor I used, and they haven't really improved matters.

To this day, when you insert a picture, impressively it manages to get every default setting wrong. No, I don't want the image to be larger than the page itself, and no, I don't want it to be inserted into the text as if it were a puctuation mark.

On a more positive note, I believe MS really struck gold with the MMC console - standardised, modular and intuitive. Bravo!

But is this lack of progress because the coders working on it now, were mired in the same barren software wastelands as my IBM compatible friends?

Do they keep making the same mistakes because they haven't experienced any different?

I raise my pint to the Amiga, a machine and a culture without which, I would not be where I am today.

Good times

Definitely the most capable computer of it's generation and class. Pity the hideous oversight of no MIDI ports allowed gamers to monopolize and kill it. Just think of all the later suffering under years of that abortion protools that could have been avoided if the Amiga had broke the pro audio market and Charlie Steinberg could have had Cubase on a superior platform.

Fond memories of writing code code to translate IMS data to relational in SAS C that got posted to Indonesia on a disk to be compiled and run unchanged on Unix.

Easier way than paying again

I just plugged my old Amiga hdd into my pc, transferred all the files off it into a folder and then run WinUAE, it boots with all my old settings and has all my old games, apps and pron. What more can you ask for?

Having everything how it used to be is ace, so if you have an old Amiga hdd, just plug it in.

Shame they don't make a proper Mac version

Forever?

When I bought Amiga Forever in the late 90s there was only one version. Since the ROMS haven't changed, I can download the latest UAE any time I like.

The Amiga was a pretty amazing machine. Way back in the mid-80s it was capable of 4096 colours on screen at once. PCs at the time were lucky to have 32 and PC games didn't really seem to exist.

I remember having 64 channels of audio and 16 MIDI channels playing in a tracker on hardware from 1992. Not to be sneezed at!

If only they hadn't dropped memory management from the OS design due to a lack of time. "Who would ever need it on a home computer" senior management asked. Ho ho ho.

I still have one in my living room somewhere. It was supposed to be so my ex-girlfriend could program it to show rotten tomatoes sliding down the screen and to go "booo" when someone she didn't like appeared on the TV. Ahhhh the wonders of cheap genloc!

Babylon 5

...wasn't really Amiga produced though. Those were video toasters with big graphics and processor boards that did the grunt, the Amiga was really only an interface to it running the software. Still great though.

Had an A500 myself then added a GVP hard drive an 8MB RAM to it (whoo, 110MB hard disk). Then took the guts out and put it in a PC tower (can't rememember the name of it, came with a board that the A500 motherboard plugged into and gave the same sort of slots as the A2000) - external keyboard as well...

Added an external graphics board that did a sort of HAM on the HAM mode itself to give 24 bit output - except other than the pictures that came with it I didn't really use it with any software...

Upgraded Agnus to a Super Fat model and Denise was done as well (ah, why don't they give chips such names these days...) - had 10MB in total in there at the end, never really used it of course but when the PCs in work at the time had only 1MB it made me feel smug! Ahh, happy times...

don't forget "autoconfig"

Amigas ruled

I myself had an A1200, which I took to pieces, removed the casing & remounted into a Full Tower AT case. A simple snip of the power cord and rewiring onto an AT PSU solved the "Not Enough power to run a 3.5" HDD" issue. I then installed a 2Gig HDD - Virtually unlimited storage! YAY!

I had a 68030 CPU upgrade card with 8Megs of Fast memory and a SCSI card too.

I installed a SCSI CDRW drive (IDE Drives back then were SHIIIIIIIT) and used it to make beer money while I was at uni.

AmiOS/Workbench was just a dream to use. Everything was INSTANT. No clicking and waiting 30 seconds for windows to pull it's finger out of its arse, which 15 Years on it is STILL doing.

A SCSI 100Meg Zip drive rounded it all off, so that I could transfer lots of stuff between the University PC labs and my dorm room. (Of course I had to format them in that terribly inefficient MSDOS format so that the PC's could read them)

Adding FAT read/write capablility to the AmigaOS was as simple as dragging the driver file off a floppy into the DEV folder - no MultiMegabyte drivers, and convoluted installation tasks for us thank you very much.

And the best thing of all : AmiNet!

Log onto ftp.doc.ic.ac.uk and browse just about every piece of Free/Share/Postcard/Beer ware and PD (later to become better known as OpenSource) Software ever created for the Amiga. Download onto a zip and take it home. Brilliant.

I really miss the efficiency, speed and customisability of my Amiga. In some ways it is still superior to modern gear. If they had added some PCI slots to the 4000, instead of just Zorro3 Slots, the IT world would be very different today.

TOS hands down

can i have my recoverable ram drive back please!

can i have my RAD (recoverable ram drive) back and ported to a native linux and/or windows soon please.

its only been 20 years+ since i could do exactly that on Amiga i know , but still, id Really like to finally be able to do a simple warm reset my PC and Boot directly from any of the RAD's iv mounted before with a simple two fingered mouse GUI click please without reloading from the HD or USB stick....

Amiga shells and ARexx

Don't forget the many freeware shells (CLI) you had available for the Amiga. I remember using SKsh, csh and not forgetting the tiny Zshell, which contained 20 or 30 *nix-like built-ins and came in some ridiculously low size (5k or 10k). Oh, and ARexx, where you could script some wonderful GUI utilities to make life easier. RIP Amiga.

My Amiga...

...lives on, on my PC these days. I transferred the whole hard drive and loads of disks across years ago using a null modem cable - took some time, but it was worth it. Glad they are still working on these things.

My Amigas are still chugging along

4000D at 1280x1024x24, 50MHz 68060 (I dream of fixing my CyberStorm PPC,) 18GB UW-SCSI(eh, may go with a UW-SCSI to SATA, or may convert to a Transcend IDE Flash... either way I'll avoid the on-board IDE,) networked, and one day (soon, hopefully) I'll pick up the Deneb USB 2.0 interface. Also notable, a loaded '060-based 2000, a couple of 500s (one loaded 500+ Rev 8, one mostly stock Rev 6,) and an '060-based 1200 just dying for an Indivision.

You know, if this machine had a PPTP VPN client, I could do all of my work from it: managing *nix servers using ssh, managing Windows servers using RDesktop, email using YAM, blah. With the exception of some web-based management apps which are heavy on Javascript. IBrowse does a good job of handling most.

Anyway, the Amiga Forever package is actually pretty worth it, overall. It provides nicely pre-configured environments, and with AmiKit now you have have a WELL configured Amiga setup in no time flat.

Had it not been for the NTSC video frame capture tech...

...that pioneered on the Amiga, we of the Coalition would not EVER heve been able to nail the State Officer ("man", my tuchus) who walked up and stomped MY FRIEND Ray D. in the chest with his Florsheim Imperial Wing Tip while ol' Ray lay captured by the Security Forces, face-up and handcuffed on the State House mezzanine lobby floor, then fled the scene amid a flurry of poppin' flashbulbs on that Very Wild an' Wooly Beacon Hill Police Riot Day, lo these many years ago.

We fingered that pasty pencil-necked face COLD. C-Limited NTSC viddy capture box did just fine on the stock Amiga 1000, no less.

We got ALL our Normal Citizens' Civil Rights nailed down solid AND signed off on the following year, albeit at the high-hand price of all our Commonwealth Universal Dental Coverage (BOO ON YOU for THAT, "Honorable" Former Governor William F. Weld, now of the MURDEROUS Council on Foreign Relations!). NOBODY of Legislator standing wanted another one of *those* swarmin' brutal police actions to explain away, especially even to their OWN sons and daughters.

Fact: Although I for one am not in any way up for marryin' anyone else any time soon, it is GOOD to know that Love did at last find a Way - in part due to the Advanced and Affordable NTSC Video Frame Capture Tech o' th' Amiga Personal Computer being THERE FOR US, reliably enabling us all to SAVE OUR OWN DAY and MANY LIVES too.

Moral: See a brutality, SNAP a brutality! Don't ALLOW any Crime Against Humanity to "just slide". VIGILANCE is the price of LIBERTY. Great Britons: SHAKE OFF YOUR CHAINS.

A GUI OS on two floppies + 256k ROM...

All of mine are still alive

The best one being a PPC A4000T with a Video Toaster 4000, 24 bit video card, DSP audio card, 10 base ether (ehh). Mt trusty ol A2000 w/040 networked in. Could emulate a Mac faster than the Mac could be a Mac. PC emulation a bit slow and not much fun. And yes, ARexx integrated into the OS and EVERY app. AmiNet offering skads of freeware, most of which would cost $30 for PC equiv. Why charge for software when it was such a pleasure to program.

Re: Haha great picture

"Like with all Linux lusers, is it a compulsory requirement to have a neckbeard and own an Amiga?"

Great joke. In my experience, back in the day the boring bearded geek stereotypes were the PC owning users, who thought it was cool running DOS on their expensive 286s. The Amiga was the mainstream home computer (in the UK, at least), used by ordinary people - just like Windows is today.

You also show your ignorance of PC history - geeks with beards are commonplace in the history of platforms such as DOS and Windows, and is hardly specific to Linux or the Amiga. Just look at this Microsoft classic, for example: http://militantgeek.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/microsoft-1978.jpg . And as for Apple, try this gem: http://munfitnessblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/apple-steve-job-with-beard-1998.jpg .

Commodore - good machines, horrible management

I started out with a Vic-20, moved up to a C-64, for which I wrote a floppy disk copier (there being nothing at the time to do that) discovered that there was a bug in the floppy disk drive firmware that shifted everything by one byte when it wrote the data out to the new floppy. After much swearing fixed that.

Moved up to C-128, bought newest double-sided floppy drive. After losing much data, discovered that firmware was again buggered, slightly bigger issue this time. While it would write to both sides of the floppy, it would only read from one side! Bought the PROMs (for both C128 and drive, grrrr), installed, tested, and put ad in paper to sell system next day. Swore I would never buy anything that Sam Tramiel had anything to do with ever again.

Watched the Amiga with envy, wanted to buy one, but only if Tramiel had been publicly staked to an ant hill, which never happened so I never bought an Amiga. Great looking machinery, totally untrustable company.

Another brilliant piece of technology that miscarried in the market for reasons other than tech. Tramiel deserves to be chased by a terminator.

Grrrrrrr!!!!

WOo :)

I'm so happy, there are practically no negative comments towards my beloved amiga. A500+ was my first computer type thing. Only used it for games mind, i was only 5 when my parents bought it for me. I remember you could use Sega Master System and Megadrive pads on it too and for some reason joystick port 2 was for player 1.

mines still running strong

A1200 with PowerPC upgrade - 240MHz of 603e power and 256Mb of RAM - with a Voodoo3

card on PCI busboard expansion. yep - these things could be expanded WAYYYY beyond their original shape/design.

anyway, for those intrigued by the current AmigaOS etc then you could do worse than head on over to amigakit and look at the SAM440EP system with OS4.1 http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=sam+flex+system

Just to tidy up a few points...

The lack of MIDI didn't kill the Amiga. Atari ST had MIDI and it didn't last as long (and where is the current ST community now? laff at it all you like, and it sure as heck is to all intents and purposes IS dead, but the Amiga *community* stumbles on).

The PC + the console killed the Amiga. The Amiga was a computer that could play games. The PC was better at being a computer (better at "BEING a computer", not a "better computer") in that it was just like your computer at work (and could share files with it etc).

And the consoles were better at playing games. Again, not better games machines themselves perhaps, but undeniably better for playing games. Whack in a cartridge or disc and seconds later - boom, you're playing a game. No faffing around with "is this compatible?" joysticks... just plug and play.

So sure, you paid more, but what you got was two separate boxes that were better suited to their respective tasks than the technically superior and downright cheaper box in the middle that tried to be both.

Sadly by the time A4000 and CD32 came along the game was already over.

And then of course there were the viruses. Interesting to note that the Amiga (and the ST to a lesser extent I think) were the virus writers target of choice back in the day, when PC's were largely blissfully ignored.

Who wants a virus prone compromise of a computer/games machine?

Memory Management.... uh, the OS absolutely had memory management. What it didn't have was any concept of memory protection... you could get yourself a pointer into any old bit of memory and fiddle to your hearts content, whether that memory belonged to you or not.

Perhaps you meant that it had no *virtual* memory? True enough, but to do virtual memory you have to have protected memory. And the crucial thing that was missing from the Amiga was any form of hardware memory management unit that would have provided that.

iirc the MMU *was* present on the A3000/4000, but NOT on the A500, A600 or A1200 etc because they used cheap versions of the 68000 processor, but since the OS and all apps had to run on all Amiga's, lowest common denominator prevailed. So no protected memory and no virtual memory.

I LOVED my Amigas (an A500, an A500+ and an A1200). I learned C, C++ and Pascal on it and to this day wish that the Windows was as productive and as much downright FUN to work with as Intuition and Exec were.

But that was then. This is now.

Console yourself with the thought that the PS3 is arguably descended from the same spirit of Amiga, not to mention the silicon (Cell is iirc begotten from PowerPC which was begotten from M68K), but of course those who bemoan incompetent corporate handling of a technological marvel are also those most likely to bemoan the remarkably efficient (i.e. profitable) corporate handling of one just as much, if not more.

Mine's the one with 20 year old OS and hardware platform in it that current "state of the art" hardware is just about able to emulate in it's pocket.

Given pricing is incorrect...

The pricing quoted as being in Euros is actually in dollars (presumably US dollars), at least if the Amiga Forever web page is to be believed.

So the cheap option is $9.95, not 9.95 euros. Given current exchange rates, the difference matters...

The Amiga failed because the PC hardware overtook it technologically - the gap between the original Amiga and a 1994 Amiga is much smaller than the gap between the 1985 PC and a 1994 PC. HAM in all its incarnations was a nightmare to render dynamically; at the time of the AGA amigas 24-bit colour was becoming common on PCs. In the same time CPUs moved from the 80186 to the early Pentiums, with on-chip FPU becoming standard. The Motorola CPUs did not improve at the pace of the Intel chips.

Allegedly a new chipset was designed after the OCS which was considerably better, but the blueprints were lost and put the Amiga back a couple of years.

Anyway, all this resulted in a situation where it moved from being better in all categories (except for productivity software availability) to where the same money would buy a PC which was faster, more capable graphically and sonically, and had a GUI (Windows 3.1) which while lacking the flexibility of AmigaOS got the job done for single-tasking - at a time when most people didn't really understand the advantages of multitasking.

Of course much of the reason *why* the Amiga fell behind is that they put stuffall money into R&D; the Amiga could only have remained a contender if it had *retained* its original edge, but for the first 5 years of its history about the only improvements were EHB mode on colour and expansion of chip RAM to 1MB...

Another one still with one

Started off with a A500 v1.2, one of the first batch in the uk of the german ones, and took to it like a duck to water while struggling with my c64 and assembler, straight in, write data straight to the chipset, trap the vb blanking interrupt ($0005c I think from memory) and sit in a loop doing something while watching for a btst #6,$bfe001 to register a 1 indicating someone pressed the left mouse button and all those lovely longword and word capable instructions, what a revelation! Lovely chipset to program for, copper and blitter just topped it off (and you could use the blitter to reprogram the copper and other funkyness they never really expected people to do). Had my fingers in some then bleedy edge games stuff and met a lot of demo sceners...

The memory allocation protection, well, there weren't such a thing as viruses until the SCA released their little wonder, they were more innocent times for sure...

Still got a scsi'd up A2000 with scsi cdrw/hd/tape drive/8086 bridgeboard card, flicker fixer with vga output and 11M of chip/fast ram. Its just for nostalgia, my days of software development on it are long since over, but I too raise a glass to the old girl and all that she's made possible.

For the cloanto prosecuting people, they say that to stop commercial exploitation of the roms and other people selling "emulator packages", rather than a bod in their bedroom finding adf's of it on the net etc. Its my experience you will have no problem finding the boot roms on the net for eg on the ever useful bootdisk.org etc.

Im with everyone else on commodore wrecking it through pure greed, what the hell were they on. I definately dont miss the days of getting my wallet emptied for months for a interface card, or any peripheral I wanted. They just saw us as a captive market once we'd bought the base box, and decided to milk us for every penny. And if you check the amiga specialist retailers still going, theyre still bleeding everyone for catweasels and buddah ide cards etc...

Don't mean to píss on your nostalgia BBQ but..

was my one *really* the only one that crashed all the time, in really annoying ways?

.. and with a very fragile filesystem (though FFS was leagues better than OFS) so when it did crash you often spent half an hour waiting for a disk check to finish, and random files to come back corrupted?

.. and the botched AGA chipset which was never going to run any high-colour or 3d software quickly (after it had spent half its cycles in chunky-to-planar loops.. ugh.)

sorry to speak wrong of the dead.. I agree with all the upsides, but it weren't all rosy.